Modern Indo-European languages – which include English – originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: “This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution – the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.

“This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there.”

The death toll from the attacks has reached at least 92; seven in the Oslo bombing and 85 in the massacre on the island of Utøya.

• A Norwegian man named as Anders Behring Breivik has been charged under the country’s anti-terror legislation.
• Police have confirmed that an unexploded device was found on the island.
• A man has been arrested for carrying a knife outside a hotel where Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg was meeting families of the Utøya victims.